The disclosed subject matter relates to techniques for displaying market depth information.
Traders engaged in the trading of market instruments can utilize software products that provide various graphical user interfaces to display market price data, execute orders and monitor status of different market conditions. Market instruments can include anything that can be traded in some quantity for a particular price. For example, a market instrument may be goods or financial products (e.g., stocks, bonds, futures, currency, commodities, or other financial instruments). Market instruments may be “real” and listed on an exchange or “synthetic,” such as a combination of real products.
Electronic trading of market instruments has been embraced as the means for buying and selling instruments in various market exchanges throughout the world. Traders can communicate with host computers of the market exchanges or other intermediary host computers coupled with the exchanges via personal computer or mobile device. Electronic trading allows for display of information regarding market instruments received from the host computer which can impact the decision making process of the trader with regard to placing trade orders.
The speed at which traders can competitively place an order can be important. For example, a trader engaged in electronic trading may decide to wait or fill an order based on the information made available to them through the electronic trading application. Even a marginal increase in speed during such process can yield significant returns for traders. Conversely, a failure to competitively fill an order in a timely manner can potentially result in significant monetary losses accumulated over time.
Traders engaged in electronic trading often process and absorb voluminous market information made available to them while trading. Certain exchanges can be fast-paced, fluid environments where price, quantity, and other market criteria constantly fluctuate within a short period of time. One type of information about a market instrument that can be important to a trader is known as market depth (i.e., the quantities of the market instrument available at particular prices). Certain conventional techniques for display of market depth information, such as tables or charts that depict the current market depth and change as new trade orders are placed on the exchange, can be cumbersome and difficult to read. Such conventional techniques can fail to provide a display of market depth that is sufficient to identify unusual trading patterns. Additionally, such conventional techniques can fail to provide a display of market depth history, which can be beneficial in certain decisions to trade a market instrument—for instance, that information can help traders to avoid submitting orders at prices for which large volumes already exist in the market, as trading ahead of these would have a considerably greater chance of execution
Accordingly, there is a need for improved techniques for the display of market depth to provide advantages to a trader, including, for example, the identification of unusual trading patterns, and/or the display of historical market depth for a market instrument.